Gone to the Forest A Novel

5



Two weeks later, his father leaves the farm, taking Jose and the girl with him.

Jose is loading a wagon full of trunks. The girl sits in the wagon bed, wrapped in a shawl. She is propped up on pillows and there is a carafe of tea by her side and an open tin of lobster. She stares straight ahead, eyes blank and cloudy. Her fingers work the fabric of her dress and she trembles very slightly. The weather has changed in the weeks since the volcano exploded.

Jose loads the wagon and his father watches. The old man is wearing a three-piece suit for traveling. A watch and chain and his wallet heavy in his pocket. He is bare headed. He looks and then goes to the girl. He pulls a blanket across her lap and tells her to eat the lobster. She nods and reaches for the tin. Fumbles with a fork and then eats it with her fingers.

His father smokes a cigarette. Jose throws rope across the heap of trunks and valises. He pulls the rope tight and the wagon rocks and creaks. They pile more trunks in. The girl’s things. She has been changed but there is still the matter of her trinkets and her objects, pilfered from his mother’s wardrobe. They drag behind her, she is barely aware of how they drag behind her. While his father is in the habit of traveling light. Never more than a single suitcase and now look at him.

Two weeks. Two weeks and he has decided to leave. He has split himself from the land, a cleaving formerly thought impossible, a separation still difficult to imagine. But now the wagon creaks with the load it carries, there is a wagon heavy with possessions, the old man is leaving like the other whites—and Tom is staying behind.

IN THE PAST two weeks Tom’s fear had grown as the valley recovered and the old man’s face grew quiet and watchful. The ash was cleared from the pastures and shoveled from the roofs of the houses. The natives hauled it away in wheelbarrows and made giant heaps on the edge of each village. Then the sky was clear and only the ash heaps stood like obscure markers to the storm.

But on the farm: a record of ongoing catastrophe. When the fish began to float in the river, Tom saw the inverse to everything: the fishing, the food on the table, the money. Everything that had drawn the girl to them in the first place. The dreamlike arms and legs of the river farm, which sat useless in the water, corralling fish that were going nowhere. As the bodies gathered they added pressure and weight until the legs creaked and cracked and then broke.

As soon as the ash stopped the old man sent the natives into the river to retrieve it. They listened to him give the order and stared into the water. They didn’t move. They stared at the mass of rotting flesh and turbid sludge. Then they looked at him as if to say: if that was what he ordered (it was). If that was what he wished (it was). They stripped down to the waist and stood on the banks of the river. They waited to see if he would change his mind. He didn’t and they tied cloths around their faces and dropped into the water.

They began moving at once. Standing waist deep in the river, they used their hands to push the bobbing fish away. They moved in the direction of the river farm and then fanned out to circle the apparatus. Their faces impassive behind the cloths. Slowly they surrounded the apparatus and then reached for the legs, which were slippery with muck and rot. They turned to pull it toward land.

The apparatus did not move. The fish were too deep in the water. The men were pushing their own legs through the layers of dead fish. They were squeezing through the wall of bodies. Moving in its crevices. They pulled again. The apparatus remained immobile. Their grip slipped on the legs and the machine sank down into the water.

They called to the men watching on the riverbank. They stripped down and plunged into the water. They shouted for rope, which they tied around the legs of the machine. They sent the lightest man to do it. He lay sprawled across the machine, moving from leg to leg, tying knots around each joint. Then he gave a shout and dropped back into the water. He shouted again and they threw the lengths of rope to the men still standing on land.

They pulled. Slowly the machine rose out of the water. With a grim expression, the men in the river dunked down below the machine and hoisted it above the river of fish. As they rose out of the water they were covered in grime to their faces. Decaying plant and flesh draped from their neck and arms. They shimmied through the dead fish, holding the apparatus above their heads, carrying and pulling it to shore. Then they dropped the machine onto dry soil and stood, reeking of rot and panting from their labor.

The river farm was in ruin. The men were too pleased with their labor to notice at first. They laughed as they wiped the river gunk from their bodies. Chunks of decomposing flesh. All the dying, all around them, became like comedy. They laughed and laughed from relief. They were almost giddy, they were content, as the rot fell from their bodies to the ground.

Into their laughter—his father’s cry, a terrible noise. He stood, staring at the machine. Slowly, the men turned and looked. It lay in a heap, groaning. Sputtering. Moaning in death throes. In actual terms the machine was silent but there was sound in the sight of the machine, sprawled out on the ground, legs collapsed, like a street thug had taken a club to each one of its joints.

Tom was also there. And he thought: it had been such a beautiful thing, the first time they had taken it out. They had carried it to the river and set it drifting. The legs had spread into the water like a living thing and it sat on the river aloft—the most astonishing thing they had ever seen. A miracle of technology and time. A piece of the future that had been shipped to their remote corner of the world. He had seen the farm’s beauty, even if he didn’t understand its role in the farm’s future, even if he also feared and hated its purpose.

Now the machine lay in ruin and it took the old man with it. They saw it happening, it took place right in front of them. They saw but it was still hard to believe. They looked at the machine. They looked at the man. They did not believe in his going. The sound, the sound of a man going—it was everywhere around them. But his face was stoic and his body straight. He looked stern and unforgiving yet. Then he turned and walked back into the house, leaving the men and the machine behind him.

BY THE WAGON, the old man puffs on the cigarette. He watches Jose continue preparations. Tom feels a churn of rage inside. From the outside, nothing is visible. But inside he is a jumble of half words and half deeds. He thinks: I have been running the farm in all but name. Leave and nothing here will change. You will see. The land will survive. Also the farm. The natives will stay here with me. And I will be fine, yes, I will be fine. He does not believe the words, which enter his head freighted in confusion.

The girl sits on the pillows and eats from the tin of lobster. Chunks of shellfish between her thumb and forefinger. She puts the tin down and wipes her fingers on the blanket. There it is: a real piece of baggage. Living and breathing as it is. Weighing the old man down as it is. Tom bristles just looking at her. She sits among the boxes and the bags and for the first time—through the cloud of rage and panic—Tom sees what his father is taking with him.

A multitude, an ocean of things. The girl is sitting on loot, on things taken—she rides high on the surf of things taken. The loaded wagon material proof of the old man’s departure. Tom cannot understand how it has come to this. Two weeks and a lifetime has been undone. He watches his father. The old man circles the wagon. He tests the ropes. The loading is almost done. He takes out his silver watch and checks the dial.

The old man is the same by most known measures. Remote, imperious, unknowable: the same as before. And yet the old man is entirely changed. Despite the disorder in his head, Tom understands something new about his father: that he is a man made visible by means of a backdrop. His father is a shape cut out against a landscape he has personally dominated and formed.

The shape is still the same. It is the backdrop that has gone, and with it everything that makes the man himself. Tom can hardly recognize his father. He cannot see him in the same way, especially now, now that he is leaving, now that he is already parted, has parted himself, from the land and property. It cannot only be Tom. Others must see him differently. A man in bad fortune. His dreams for the future looking foolish. A man without money, which is also ridiculous.

Tom does not know if his father is aware of how he looks. He does not think he cares. His father has been preoccupied. He has stayed to his study. Looking at papers, laying out maps, writing down figures. The old man making midnight telephone calls, the conversations muffled by the house’s thick walls so that Tom did not hear the matters being discussed. Although he eavesdropped carefully, diligently.

There was more: the departure of the three men, the day the ash stopped falling. Who left with promises of their return and the strong smell of brilliantine. That afternoon the girl crawled out from her room. She did not look like herself. She was pale and even thinner but the difference was in her eyes. Which had fallen back into her head. She was watching things from a distance, measurably greater than before.

There were other differences. The girl now stayed close to the old man. She was with him all the time. She sat inches away from him at dinner, fork clanging at his plate, fingers reaching for his elbow. The girl standing between the father and the son. Like she was the physical manifestation of the barrier Tom had often tried to deny, but that had always existed between them. As if she were now the guardian of that distance. Tom saw her sitting by the old man’s side. He saw her lift up her face to look at him.

They might have shared blood. The girl the old man’s daughter. The girl the old man’s son, as he might have been, the girl the old man himself. They would stay together. One and one being two. One and one and one on the other hand—it did not add up. Tom did not fit in. In the house there was sunlight and dust so thick it made patterns in the air. He passed the old man’s study, he saw the girl and the old man sitting side by side. Neither looked up.

Later, he came upon the girl alone. He stopped and she stopped, too. He looked down at her hand, it was hard for him to look her in the face. She was still wearing his mother’s engagement ring. He shook his head in confusion and looked up. Now at her face, which had been wiped blank. She knitted her brow as she looked at him.

“What has happened?”

He intended to sound firm. As if he had some purchase on the situation. He was aware of how close she stood. The fetid smell of her hair.

She shook her head. She had never liked Tom. And they had wanted her to marry him. They had believed this was the solution. Her eyes widened. Briefly. An instant later they receded and she recovered her distance.

Her eyes were once again blank. Not that Tom knew or understood. No details—the details sickened him. He knew that something had happened, that there had been an incident. In this backdrop of new catastrophe. He saw how the girl was and that was enough. He looked at her again.

“Please.”

She shook her head. She sighed: the sound like her lungs had broken.

“Do you know—”

She stopped. The girl meant nothing to him and even so. Tom swallowed and waited for her to speak. Her face was vague and she did not look at him when she spoke, her eyes wandered and wandered instead.

“The Rheas. The birds are big. The size of humans. They live on land. Too big to fly—”

She paused. Her brow crossed with confusion. She started again.

“A male Rhea has a dozen mates. He impregnates one bird and then moves on to the next. But he risks his life in defense of all his offspring.”

She paused again. He had no idea what she was talking about. She shook her head.

“No. I wanted to tell you something different. Something about the Rheas.”

She stopped and seemed to think about it. She picked loose a dry piece of skin from her lip.

“When the men fight to assert dominance it goes like this—”

She cleared her throat and closed her eyes.

“When the male Rheas fight to assert dominance it goes like this. They lock necks and spin around in circles. Because they are large birds—some as heavy as one hundred pounds—they gather tremendous momentum. They spin around and around and around. The one who gets dizzy first is the loser. They keep going until there is a loser. They don’t stop until then.”

She opened her eyes and smiled at him. Her face was cunning again, it was canny.

“Do you see?”

He did not see. He thought she might have lost her mind.

AFTER SHE TOLD the story about the Rheas, Tom began to think his father might marry the girl after all. The girl being the last remaining symbol of his power. The girl whom he would legitimate for this reason. It would happen the way a bank transfer happened. In material terms the ring would stay on her finger. Meanwhile the attachment it represented would transfer from one man to the other. It would be personally humiliating but Tom was used to being humiliated. He could have lived with it.

But this—he looks at the wagon. He watches his father check the ropes one last time. This abandonment, by all of them—it is worse than the nightmares that plague him at night. Jose leads three horses out from the stable. A pair to pull the wagon and his father’s best horse. The old man mounts the expensive animal, the horse likely worth more than the farm at this point. He circles the wagon and goes to the girl, who has finished the tin of lobster. He takes the empty tin from her and hands it to one of the servants.

They are going. It is happening! It cannot be stopped. Nothing Tom can do will be enough to make the old man stay. Jose climbs aboard the wagon and whips the horses to life. They strain and pull and the wagon creaks. They move an inch and then a foot. The horses have never been made to carry such weight. Jose whips the pair again and at last they bear the wagon away. His father rides alongside. He does not look at his son as he goes.

Tom watches as the cart and horse move down the track. Two days ago his father had said to him—two days, it has only been two days, since his father announced that he was leaving. He had come to the shed, where Tom was cleaning the tack. It was dark and there were soft drifts of ash still on the floor and on the shelves.

“Thomas.”

He had stopped at the sound of the old man’s voice.

“We’re going.”

Carefully, he put down the bridle and harness.

“We—”

“Carine and I.”

He turned to face the old man in the darkness. Both of them black from lack of light.

“Where?”

“To the city.”

“For how long?”

“I do not know.”

He nodded, his mouth was dry. He wondered why his father had chosen to speak to him here—in the shed, the smell of leather and oil and horse shit. Of all places.

“What will happen to the farm?”

“I leave that to you. It is yours, now.”

The words were meaningless. The ownership was meaningless, now. Tom turned back to the bridle. He gripped the metal and leather straps. He picked up the rag, rubbed the oil into the straps, he polished the metal and tried to think of a way to speak.

“Is it because of the girl?”

The old man didn’t answer. Tom continued to rub oil into the leather.

“It would be a shame—to let a woman come between us.”

His voice catching. The words difficult to say. The old man still did not answer. Tom put the bridle down. He turned to face his father.

“I don’t mind. I understand.”

The old man did not move.

“You can have her.”

He could not see the old man’s face. He stood in the silence with his feet in the ash. The old man let out a short laugh. Like the muffled sound of heavy blows. Tom continued, raising his voice.

“There is no reason for you to leave. You could both stay. I understand.”

The old man did not move. The silence bounded through the dark. Tom peered at him, hands trembling. He waited for the old man to speak.

“We are going.”

Abruptly, his father turned. He walked to the door and pulled it open. The blood rushing to Tom’s head as he watched. Standing in darkness, Tom watched the old man walk away. He tried to understand what had happened. What the old man had said. What he meant by what he said. How such a thing could be possible. He cleaned and oiled the bridles three times over. Then he trudged back to the house.

That was two days ago. Now Tom stands in front of the house and watches as the procession—a short procession, very short—moves away. The girl’s shawl flutters and then falls to her side. As the distance grows, he watches her small hand stroke it into place. He keeps watching, as the wagon pulls through the gate, down the track, becoming smaller and smaller. Then his father brings his own horse to a gallop, like he cannot wait to get away from the place. In a moment they are gone.

The servants stand stock-still. They stare after the wagon, down the track, like that will bring the old man back. Bring Jose back. They murmur to each other and wait. Celeste at the front of the group, peering hard at the horizon. They wait for the cart to return, for the miracle to happen. It is not going to happen. Tom wants to tell them this, he wants to tell Celeste, but they are not going to listen to him. There are still puffs of dust from the wagon visible on the road and he lets them cling to that.

Tom turns and goes back to the house. He is not aware that he is running but his feet are pounding the stone floor. The house is dark and cool. He turns and checks to see if anyone is following. Nobody is there, they are still standing at the front of the house, waiting for the old man to return. Tom wipes at the sweat on his forehead, he is suddenly perspiring, and continues down the dark hallway. He pushes open the door to the old man’s study.

He scans the room, then heads to the desk. He opens the drawers, looking for papers, bank notes, bonds. Keys to the safe, sacks of money and coin. None of which he finds. He examines the walls, looking for a safe. He looks underneath the desk, below the tables. He shoves aside a painting on the wall—nineteenth century, a young woman and a small dog. The safe is empty as a drum.

He sits down. He thinks he must have fever—that must be the reason for the room spinning like it is. There are sicknesses in these parts. There is illness in his blood. Look at his mother. Now his father has deserted the farm, taken the money and the valuables, and Tom does not know where he has gone. He only knows that his father will set up a new life. The old man will have his third act.

And here is the son with nothing. The woman gone and the son’s inheritance lost in a cloud of ash, carried away on a wagon cart. How will he make the farm run? How will he keep it safe? The joke is this: his father could save the farm but chooses not to. He built this place therefore it follows that he knows how to save it. But he chooses to go away instead. People will say it is about the unrest. They will say it is about the girl. They will say that the old man cannot bear the heat and has gone away instead.

It does not matter what people say. What matters is this: the old man has looked at the farm and decided it was not worth the trouble. It including Tom. The old man has made his choice and Tom has fallen by the wayside. When Tom has always believed, he has trusted in the bond between the land and the old man, he has allowed himself to think his place in that bond meant more than it did. He had thought the old man would take care of him.

Tom sits down in his father’s armchair. The house is quiet. He looks at the papers that are scattered on the floor—he had upended drawers in his search. He picks up the papers again. There may be something he missed. Bank details. Offshore accounts. Hidden and electric treasure. He is not avaricious but he is human and practical despite himself. He stands up and goes to the desk. He looks at the papers—he reads them for the first time. He sets them down again.

He does not really understand. Tom does not have a head for such things. He is not accustomed to the idea of the world outside the farm. Tom has no inflated sense of his personal capacities, he is not unusually arrogant, but he believes his world will hold fast. The idea that changes in the world outside the farm—the idea of the world outside in the first place—that together they can shift his personal landscape, that is one, two, three leaps too many.

Tom does not know about appeasement. He does not know about the deals that are made. Expropriation is not a word in his small—small and shrinking, shrinking with each moment—vocabulary. He does not know that people can send you notices and the notices are not just pieces of paper but pieces of paper that have real meaning in the world.

Real meaning as in: I show you this piece of paper and you have one month to go. Real meaning as in: I show you this piece of paper and the property you think of as yours is no longer the property you think of as yours, the property you think of as yours is something else entirely.

According to the papers most of the land no longer belongs to them. The papers (and the maps, there are many maps in amongst the papers) delineate the new acreage of the farm and it is dramatically reduced in size: the ten-mile spine has been lopped at both ends and only ten thousand acres remain. The negotiation has happened, the expropriation has begun. The land is being taken from the white settlers. The trees and hills have picked up and gone, they have packed their bags and departed down the track.

Like his father. They are gone in exactly the same way. Tom picks up a map indicating the new lay of the land and then drops it. It falls to the floor and crumples. Ninety thousand acres gone! He will need to ask his father what to do, only his father will know. But the old man is nowhere in sight. Instead there is just his signature, on the bottom of page after page after page.

His father is not moved by malice, Tom thinks, just by self-interest. His father being the most selfish man that ever breathed. For the first time Tom understands this. Only his mother was as selfish as the old man and that was why they did not love each other but were tied together in ways they half understood and fully resented. The two of them were the same in the end. They went in the same way. First the mother had gone by way of sea. Now the father has gone by way of land and the son is left alone.

Tom returns to the veranda. The servants have disappeared and the place is quiet. So here he is. The farm is his at last. He looks out to the horizon and he is terrified. The world outside, beyond its borders. He sees the three men and the documents they were examining. He sees his father reading the newspaper. The knotted grip of his hands. Tom has always been slow to understand. The men were not there because of what happened to the girl that night. The men only being messengers for something else. It had nothing to do with her. No man ever stayed because of what happened to a woman.

They stayed for other reasons. And now they are gone and the land is also gone. All that is left is the papers. The papers and with them the people who will come to claim the land. How will it happen? Who will come? Tom’s laughter pierces through the air. The world is shrinking to a piece of paper. A white sheet pinned to the line and the sound of it thwacking against the wind. The land will cave. The paper is going to tear. And him, still here.